The once flourishing village near Pamuru with cultivation of both wet and irrigated dry crops has gone almost barren, with the Mopadu reservoir across Manneru going bone dry owing to the prevailing drought condition for the last five years in a row.
Forget about the assured irrigation for their crops, farmers here now struggle hard to get their quota of safe drinking water from the reservoir, with the capacity to store 2.09 tmcft of water.
Crop could not be grown even on a single acre of land in the village in the last two years as the reservoir, which was designed to irrigate 12,500 acres, has gone dry, the farmers complain.
Four borewells in the village coming under Kanigiri Assembly constituency have also dried up and the villagers are forced to wait, even at odd hours, both during the day and night to fetch a few pots of water, lamented a group of villagers, while waiting for their turn to collect water from a borewell near the Mopadu Bunglow.
“Water was being supplied through tankers prior to the general elections last year and the service came to an end with the polls itself. Now, none appears bothered about the issue,” says Vijayamma, a woman from the village. Reiterating the same, another woman M. Adamamma demanded that water supply through tankers be resumed at the earliest. More over, the villagers have to wait for the three-phase power supply during which they can draw water from the available borewells and a long wait in the serpentine queues does not yield much for them.
“We wait for three-phase power supply between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. and between 11.00 p.m. and 4 a.m. everyday only to manage a few pots of water,” says Guntapalli Jayaraju, a farmer from the SC Colony.
Given the situation, the villagers are forced to depend on the private suppliers for drinking water cans. But, not many can afford to it.
“We can’t afford to buy water cans at Rs. 20 per a can of 20 litres,” says Mr. Jayaraju.
With the prevailing drought situation, crop acreage in this village has also gone down.
In 2013, cultivation could be taken up only in 1,000 acres as against the 3,000 acres in 2012 , Irrigation Junior Engineer G. Satish told The Hindu, adding that the groundwater table has gone down further and borewells need to be sink up to 350 ft to get water.
Even the available water has high fluoride content, resulting in many suffering from skeletal fluorosis and renal failure, complains Indluri Abraham, another villager.
The State government should provide safe drinking water to the village inhabited mostly by BCs, SCs and STs under the NTR Sujala Sravanthi scheme, pleaded an agriculture worker Kodavatakanti Mohan.
“We want the government to provide wage employment at least for 150 days a year. We have no jobs in our hand in view of the severe drought,” he says.
